On January 28th you may recall that I did a huge blog post on why I’m building a bigger link network. In that post I showed in great detail how Godaddy were utilising customers who are using their SSL services and getting top search rankings by adding anchor-text-rich backlinks in the widgets that clients place on their websites.

About a month after my blog post, Godaddy dropped back to page two for all of the terms they were ranking number one for. Even though they dropped off the radar slightly, the SSL certificates niche is still an industry I watch with great interest because it’s one where big brands can get away with doing pretty much anything they want (unless someone calls them out on it?). The latest update from that industry is pretty bold: Symantec have since taken over all of Godaddy’s rankings and they’re doing the exact same thing, having amassed almost 3 million backlinks in the last 7 months.
Just take a look at this screenshot from Ahrefs:

You’re all smart enough to be able to go and look at their backlinks in much more detail, but here’s a sample of some of the hugely authoritative websites they’re getting widget links from:

Keurig, the American Coffee brand

Cigna, a Global Health Insurance company

PeruRail, a luxury train service

Mothercare, the worldwide maternity brand

Norton.com, the anti-virus company (which they own)

Verisign.com, who handle their SSL certificates

And on it goes.

On Perurail, the link is nicely placed in the footer (without a no-follow attribute) and appears sitewide. The Norton badge works totally fine (it is a pop-up with security information like most privacy badges) so there’s really no need for the link.

They also have a nice link from the sitewide footer from Norton.com – the anti-virus company which are owned by Symantec.

Note that the link doesn’t appear until you click on the “+ icon” next to Website Security Solutions. I’m not going to make any comments about the ID’s in their HTML and the name of their CSS file, but to let you come to your own conclusions about whether they have any idea what they’re doing here ;).

Also interesting is that their sitewide link on Keurig.com only appears when you click on the ‘Sign In’ button in the top right hand corner of their website. There’s no badge attached, just the text “About SSL certificates”. The exact phrase that Godaddy were using for a lot of their links.

(I would guess that Keurig have no idea about this).

They didn’t always use this term. After some serious link sleuthing it appears they used to try to optimize for “About trust online” but I’m sure this new version is much more lucrative.

The rankings for the page speak for themselves…

The sad thing is that, legitimately, Symantec are probably one of the better sites to rank for these search terms, yet they have to resort to tactics like this. I wouldn’t believe for a second if anyone told me they’re oblivious to what they’re doing and didn’t realise it would have positive SEO implications. They have this anchor-rich do-followed link on at least 1,200 websites and growing.

It’s also clearly a very new practice.

Dr. Houzz Analysis of Another Brand That Makes Their Own Rules

A few weeks ago one of my eagle-eyed readers in the home improvement niche showed me some rankings for a website named Houzz. I’d never heard of them so was quite surprised to see them literally dominating their industry’s search results, in some cases occupying 17 of the first 20 Google search results.

I tweeted a screenshot of their rankings which got quite a bit of attention:

After a bit more research, it turns out that Houzz are a pretty huge brand in the home improvement niche. I’m sure most American readers of this website have heard of them already, but if you’re in another geographic region they may be new to you. Here are some stats from their advertising page:

16 million monthly visitors

300 million monthly pageviews

15 million downloads of their app(s)

As you can see, they’re not some small website that has managed to take over Google. They’re a well-known brand with, honestly, what seems to be a pretty cool website. I don’t know if there’s a UK-alternative but I can see it would be very useful for people who are looking to furnish their home.

Keeping in line with those amazing search results for their brand, SEMRush reports that their search traffic has done nothing but increase over the last two years.

An Important Note Before I Reveal My Findings

I have to be totally honest here: I went into my analysis of the Houzz brand with the hope of finding something suspicious. Dominating search results like they are just isn’t “normal” and certainly not something you see every day. Despite all of the tools at my disposal, it took me a good 40 minutes to figure out what they were doing.

After combing through literally thousands of links in Majestic SEO and Ahrefs (with premium accounts), I have to say that a large portion of their backlinks seem to be totally legitimate. They’ve smartly built a brand that people naturally want to talk to. If you want to show your credibility in any facet of interior design, you probably have a profile on their website and then you link back to that from your own website.

The type of link building that they do which I’m about to “out” to you was found by trying to use their widgets which, surprise surprise, is what Godaddy and Symantec have been abusing as well.

It’s almost like they’re not even trying to by secretive about it.

I mean, each of these widgets has more than a dozen links in them (without no-follow, of course) and they’re clearly benefiting from it. It’s working so well that I’m sure they have little incentive to stop.

Update:: 24 hours after this blog post went live, Houzz have removed all links from their widget. Sadly this will only protect new people who add their widget. Since the previous links were hard-coded as you can see in my screenshot, this means they still keep the millions of links they built with this tactic and no doubt they’ll keep the rankings too.

The Google Paranoia Train Keeps Running

I know I shouldn’t be surprised at Google’s preference over big brands and how it’s getting out of control but it still amazes me they go after the smaller guys with such focus. The recent drama around a website owned by Doc Sheldon caused quite a stir. His entire website received a manual penalty over one or two blog posts that had been written on the site.

I missed the news as it “broke” but Search Engine Land wrote a pretty scathing review of Google and Matt Cutts in their post entitled: “How a Single Guest Post May have Gotten an Entire Site Penalized”.

I’m not going to rehash what a lot of bloggers have said far better than I could so I recommend you read their article to get the full story. Just keep in mind that Google are now taking to determine what content is actually relevant for your website.

@DocSheldon what "Best Practices For Hispanic Social Networking" has to do with an SEO copywriting blog? Manual webspam notice was on point.

Without looking at the post, I don’t see how that isn’t relevant for an SEO and marketing blog? Even more so when you realise that Doc lives in Mexico.

Danny Sullivan, the founder of SEL, is pretty much the number one authority when it comes to search engine news and Google goings-on so I found this part of his analysis interesting, but not surprising:

“[..] the BBC, Mozilla and Sprint all had penalties issued against them involving a single page of content on their sites. But unlike Sheldon, only those pages were penalized, not the entire site.”

I was quite sad to see that Google’s actions over the last few months have had such an impact on one of my favourite SEO bloggers, Jon Cooper from PointBlank SEO.

“I really believe Google is transitioning from being on the defensive, to being on the offensive. Fear building is continuing to grow, and it’s definitely off to a hot start in 2014.”

I still get total beginners to SEO saying they now have no idea what they’re allowed or supposed to be doing.

I still get link removal requests on the various sites I run even though they are totally legitimate links.

I still see “toxic links” and “bad link removal” services being advertised around the web with huge marketing budgets — a profitable niche that Google has opened up with their actions.

I still see Google going after the little guys rather than tackling major players.

There should be zero doubt in your mind that making the average person scared to do SEO is Google’s aim. As I mentioned in my post on Godaddy, when we censor our own activities it makes their job much easier.

I’m not trying to get you to become some Google hater and search engine rebel – I’ve stressed in multiple blog posts that their job is equivalent to a goal keeper trying to save 100 penalties at the same time – but their focus publicly definitely appears flawed.

This Google paranoia has also worked on me. With blog posts like this I’m definitely “poking the bear” (as Jon put it) and with that in mind I’m not going to say too much more about certain tactics that I get involved in. For instance, the number one request I get for content on this blog is to cover link networks in more detail but some of the things I do just wouldn’t be as effective any more if I wrote them down here, in public.

Similarly, a lot of little hacks and tricks you come across when analysing rankings so often are working in credibly well. These are things you will have to figure out for yourself if you haven’t already. I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions (I’m primarily writing this for new visitors to the blog) that I advise you to build another site in the industries you’re targeting and really push the boundaries. Don’t jeopardize a 5-year old website with great branding because some ViperChill guy says the Google guidelines don’t mean shit. Try out “greyhat” tactics on your new domain and see what happens.

You may just be pleasantly surprised. There are a lot of flaws in the Google algorithm at the moment, not limited to how to recover a rankings penalty in 2-3 days and get hundreds of thousands of pages indexed quickly (which rank).

Speaking of flaws…

Is the Algorithm Flawed? Here’s My Perspective

What is perhaps the most important question I have when I come across websites and results like this is simply: Do Google know about it?

Did any part of Google’s internal alerts pick up on what Symantec, Houzz and other brands with similar strategies are doing?

Really there’s two scenarios’ here: 1) They know about it and they aren’t doing anything. 2) They don’t know about it.

Which either shows that Google are letting big brands get away with doing whatever they want, or the algorithm for a company valued at 400 billion dollars can handle a single link to My Blog Guest better than it can an internal page suddenly picking up three million backlinks.

When I write about this topic and show the strategies of certain websites, I really don’t expect much to change. Here’s a rundown of some of the websites or industries I’ve blogged about to show I really don’t have an impact as some people would suggest:

“how to grow taller” still has search results which are single-page websites

The Godaddy situation was quite interesting as – while they did appear to drop back to page 2 for all SSL related terms – it’s not something I can prove. When I wrote about them originally I wasn’t watching them with a rankings tracker and neither SEMRush nor Search Metrics show that they slipped for SSL related terms. All I know is that when I said they had the number one spot for certain SSL keyphrases, not one person in 200 comments called me out saying “I don’t see those search results” which has happened with other blog posts.

Also, ranking on page 2 doesn’t scream “Google penalty!”.

I’m not trying to say the above examples are good industries or overly competitive (though there’s a lot of money to be made in each of them), I’m just showing that my writing on these topics didn’t seem to have an effect on the search results. I don’t expect Houzz or Symantec to get penalised because I write about them here and honestly I would prefer if they weren’t directly targeted – there’s clearly something lacking in Google’s algorithm here if they aren’t turning a blind eye to it all which I think they are.

I’m simply writing this with the aim of hopefully educating you that the guidelines Google-preach are not as enforced as you would think. They are a company that has shareholders to please, and unstable organic search results has certainly pulled a lot of people over to PPC advertising who didn’t need to use it before.

A Simple “Bug” Can Cost You All Google Traffic

One of the craziest examples I saw recently of the flaws in Google’s algorithm was the drama regarding movie websites. To cut a long story short, a lot of sites in the movie review business lost almost all of their Google traffic for a 10 day period. This includes authority websites like Slashfilm and Screenrant.

What kind of response is that? To me it shows that Matt clearly knew there was a problem with the algorithm but didn’t have time to do anything about it. Just imagine for one second that they weren’t able to even reach Matt on Twitter (a.k.a the hundreds of millions of foreign webmasters out there); how long do you think they would have suffered?

If you’ve ever had any doubt that Google apply different algorithms to different industries, there’s your undeniable proof.

One Paragraph I Would Leave to My SEO Team

I’m a big fan of Inc. magazine (and using Inc. in my business names) and came across a great feature in their latest issue. I don’t get the physical magazine; I just download it on my iPad so it’s very convenient. The feature was basically along the lines of 35 questions you should ask yourself if you run a company. Usually these kind of features have great headlines but lame content. That certainly wasn’t the case here — some of the questions were amazing and really made me think.

There seems to be a version of it online, here, but keep in mind a lot of those questions are pretty bad (there’s 100 there, versus a condensed 35 in the magazine).

I think one of the toughest questions was submitted by Pat Lencioni, founder of The Table Group:

“If I had to leave my organization for a year and the only communication I could have with employees was a single paragraph, what would I write?”

Keeping in mind that my answer here will be towards people who are involving in the running of the SEO company I co-founded with Diggy, rather than my entire business operations with plugins and affiliate sites and forums and…you get the picture.

Here’s what I would say right now…

“Continue to focus on what you find is working, rather than what any organisation (e.g. Google) or SEO claims to be the strategy to follow. Never jeopardize a client for the sake of a quick win. The people who thrive in this business are equal parts testers and equal parts action takers. You can’t use one part of that equation properly without the other. Don’t think about what I would do; do what you think is right.”

The last sentence was inspired from watching an interview with Tim Cook who revealed that “doing what he thinks was right” is the advice Steve Jobs gave him to continue leading Apple forward.

Hopefully there are a few questions in that list that can help you take your own business to the next level.

I’ll be doing another blog post like this in a similar vein (but with a more positive result) in the next few days so make sure you’re on my email list if you aren’t already. Just put your primarmy address that little yellow box below. I’ve never sent a spam email in my life and don’t have any plans to start now .

This is another fantastic article. Looks like without anyone calling them out, the practice will undoubtedly continue as there is little reason to stop. I assume GoDaddy is continuing the practice themselves?

When I first heard of the Doc Sheldon story, I had the same reaction as you. Seems like the guest posts had everything to do with his blog. You would think it’s obvious that Social Networking has at least a little to do with SEO. It makes Cutts’ response on twitter sound crazy. The curious thing is that the guest post is from a while ago before Cutts made his declaration that guest posting is dead. We can glean from this that Google will retroactively enforce random guest posts that some guy decides isn’t up to snuff. That’s a bit crazy.

When this bit about guest posting being dead went out, I thought to myself, how will they differentiate a good guest post from a bad one. The answer seems to be arbitrarily.

Hey Glen,
fantastic in-depth article as always. Even though we’re both totally focused on the SEO world, I’m more caught up in the actual ranking of sites all day so it’s great to stay up to date with these kinds of analysis.

Bottom line is that pure linkbuilding still works and until Google finds a completely new algorithm or way to rank websites, SEO is going to continue to work for the foreseeable future.

This is an eye-opener Glen!I think we need to stop relying on any traffic medium and just focus on creating information-rich contents on our blogs. I hope Google is soon knocked out of the search engine game. They only do what they think is right with their system. We now live in a convulated SEO world!

I have been waiting for a post for days now I came to the blog at least 4 times PER DAY, every day since I read the last post before this one. I thought something had happened to you man. However i checked your facebook page and saw you posting stuff so i felt some relief.
Great piece…. As always ( i can always FEEL the energy, effort, and time put in every post,.. and especially this one)

About the link to Inc. magazine >>> Powerful piece of sh*t!!
loved it….

Unbelievably, I am shocked and annoyed at the same time with Google’s behaviour.
But mission will be to position the site(s) as a brand and utilise those methods that I know and believe to be working.

I got something similar to the widget method but its execution will have to be more subtle and not as blatant as these guys. But truth be told, maybe not. It could a case of you are either going to get slapped or not regardless of how savvy or aggressive you are ?

Great as always Glen and I certainly believe Google targets verticals in different ways, they have too really.

If you think about it certain industry is really quite boring … for example look at Carpet Cleaning – I mean really how many links can you carpet cleaning business legitimately get? If you examine the results there is loads of companies engaged in all sorts to get to the top, these are legitimate popular businesses. If Google penalised the results they would have a bunch of crappy results not on topic… its “spam vs relevance” – who wins?

I had started SEO last year and was ridiculously surprised at how easy it is to rank for low to medium competition keywords on the first page.

Anyways, definitely looking forward to your full case study Glenn. I’m glad you’re now focusing on SEO, it’s pretty difficult to find “real” advice about SEO unless you digg through forums and test out what people say.

I talked to some small business owners in a certain niche about whether they would want to hire SEO services. And they said that they prefer using PPC instead, since PPC gives them more stable and predictive results.

Maybe it is not the overall behaviour pattern yet, but anyway, I think Google knows what it does.
It is fear building not only among SEOs, but also among SEOs’ clientele.

To be honest I would have (before reading this) thought that sitewide dofollow links accross multiple domains would have been less effective – especially as it *seems* that since your last post Google have done something to, either manually or via an algo update, decrease the value of Godaddy’s links.

What we can say though is there’s going to be quite a few people that see this post and try the tactic – but as soon as something like this is common knowledge, it’s often worthless.

Great article again Glen… I had a couple of thoughts reading it I hope you don’t mind me sharing. Playing a bit of devils advocate here on point 2 as well so bare with me…

Point 1

I used to work in PR and if you couldn’t crack a journalist to write some positive stories about you, one trick was to throw the media outlet a bone and take up some advertising with a promise of more if you could just crack that journo. The ad exec was always more than willing to lean on them a bit and hey presto, 9 times out of 10 they’d respond to your next press release.

Why am I posting this here? Flip it on its head.

As you point out, Google is responsible to its shareholders and the majority of its income is from advertising. If Houzz (or GoDaddy or Symnatec) are advertising with Google, which I daresay they are, it stands to reason they wouldn’t penalise them – and by “them” you can read any of the big players – because they’re likely to lose out on positive advertising relationships. Yes its different departments with different budgets but if Google slaps their SEO activity down, you can guarantee a boss somewhere who doesn’t quite understand the distinction would advise pulling it all. I see that type of reaction every day in the corporate world.

Point 2

The devils advocate bit… but could Google be the BIGGEST victim of big data. Its a pretty common thread nowadays that there’s just too much data for even the biggest of companies to accurately drill down, segment and activate. Google probably has the most data on the planet at their fingertips and I’d suggest even with their boundless resources cracking every single nugget, eventuality and possible probability is a massive challenge. Especially when theirs a smart world of SEOs and digital marketers challenging every level of their algorithm daily with a hope of breaching it to their advantage.

I’m not coming down on Google’s side particularly here, I agree it should be a level playing field with set rules or no rules at all but it does seem to me that until someone like you Glen point this out then they very probably can’t see it. Same with the movie review sites.

So keep up the great work pointing this stuff out, it really is awesome stuff and can’t wait until the next installment.

Just my thought… Maybe Google owns a lot of websites which they favor for ranking high in their search engine. Yeah there is favoritism happening. When we talk about manual penalty this can sometimes be bias.

You mentioned about getting indexed FAST in your blog post. Are you planning on writing more about it? Or is there a resource somewhere you could link to? I’ve been quite interested in this topic – especially ranking stuff outside the English world – and I would love to read what you have on it.

Very interesting results and glad you’re talking about this. Another major website that I’ve come across who are dominating almost all searches in their niche is GoFundMe. I remember checking their backlink profile a while ago and the anchor text profile was ridiculously skewed. Upon further investigation I found hidden links in their widgets!

They seem to be mixing things up more now but a ton of links are still coming from these widgets they have campaign owners embed…

Too many big companies are getting away with this! But if you can’t beat em, join em!

I really feel like, amongst the SEOs crowd anyway, Google is trying to move from a system where they do all of the detection to one where website owners and non-Google properties do a lot of the work (ie the disavowing). Not sure whether that will result it better or worse results in the long term.

I was reading a discussion on a marketing forum about how it’s making millions of dollars for the guys who are ranking.

I don’t really see how they are ranking though. Is it blog networks?

I’m also not sure if it’s one company who has a bunch of shill sites or if it’s all affiliates (or both?). What’s interesting is how they’re ranking all over the front page of Google, as well as in paid traffic.

Do you see this kind of thing a lot in your own research? I thought Google checked their paid traffic more closely than the organic stuff. Guess this means they don’t.

The approach that Google has taken in recent years is troubling. I can understand them getting more and more sneaky about ad placement on their results pages (the exact kinds of things they warn us against doing,) but how they treating small business owners is frustrating.

Google is not transparent on what is/is not/will be acceptable, and I’ve seen a lot of people penalized for doing nothing even remotely black hat. To top it all off, the company is unreachable for any kind of help.

They have enabled negative SEO tactics, and built a complete industry around thieves who will hit your site with toxic links then charge you to remove them.

Google is not the altruistic company they claim to be. They offer a lot of really good services, but they are seemingly driven by profit at all costs.

That’s a great article. Google has always favored bigger brands than smaller ones. In their eyes if a large company does spam it’s called advertising.

Just because we had few great articles from MyBlogGuest, we got penalized but the top players will never get penalties even if they give out a million links. They must have put a saturation level in their algorithm for large websites.

Sorry to hear that you were hit. I never got involved in MBG so I’m not sure how far people were going to “game” the system. Advertising that you could get links – on their homepage – probably wasn’t their smartest move though.

Glenn – exactly what I found when I left the industry for a while (due to personal issues I had to settle as well as begin “google-shy” after Penguin/Panda): Google is at the one hand unpredictable (not evenly distributing what it’s preaching: favoring brands, favoring certain niches for themselves and possibly their advertisers), on the other hand it’s situation normal. Competitors who replaced my money-making sites are building links just like I preached in my books and on my blog – ironically my own sites got slapped.

But you’re right when you say the game is for those who test, for those who diversify their sites, for those with the right tools to study what’s working and to apply those practices, knowing it’s a risk all the way. At the end of the day, Google is but ONE source of traffic – knowing how to connect with your market is quite another facet altogether, and it is possible to do business online without the big G, after all.

I’d just recommend diversifying traffic sources, but experiment with what works *in your niche*. Great post as always.

[mode recognition ON ] I read you since so many time… Every piece of post is always a break in my reflexions. Thanks a lot for your freshness [mode recognition OFF]

As you said “…If you’ve ever had any doubt that Google apply different algorithms to different industries, there’s your undeniable proof”, I am totally with you thinking that GG is really applying differents approches (algorythms ?) to different industries, definitively. I have a customer in the french “purchases gold” market and I see soo many changes, some very irrational, EVERY DAY. One day I can discover a spammer, one another day a local competitor coming from nothing… Obviously, I also know that there are Quality Raters seated on the 1st of this query
Mix all that parameters and you have a strange GG behavior in these SERPs.
IMHO, GG is more focused to improve his Adwords business (each day new people are hired to support new clients…) and less its algorythm and in order to preserve its goodness, Cutts, Muelller and other are creating a climat of fear around them. Just my 2 cents of … euros !

Great article. Love coming back to get the brain thinking. I have been proactive following your advice since Backlinks.xxx came out and it is really refreshing. I am doing more testing and working on what works. It’s been a grind but it is a good feeling testing your ideas in your niche. I believe Google is biased at times and turns a blind eye to many scenarios but each obstacle now represents an opportunity to learn. You make so many solid points. Thanks for the brain food!

Glen,
When I saw your initial tweet about this I did not really think much of it other than that it showed brand favoritism. I did however take notice of what was said in the comments by a follower and responded to by you. I won’t repeat the conversation, but when a follower of yours says ” my competitor :)” , your response there and this follow up post really have me scratching my head.
Interesting to note is that two days later I was doing a search for the term “horizontal fence” and guess who pops up? The result was top 1-5 (somewhere in there) for the query. The result was trash once I clicked through as nothing at all was even remotely related to my search, but there you go.
Just find it all interesting.

Really interesting post here indeed, I am really curious to see what Google does with future updates. It’s hard to say if these widgets are “Ok” in the eyes of Google.

P.S. I recently launched my own link network, I would be interested in chatting with you on my Podcast if you have some free time in the next few months for an interview. I e-mailed you about this but never heard back.

Hello Glen!
You really keep an eagle-eye on the whole world of SEO.
It took almost 1 hour to carefully read such a long blog post. But I know, spending an hour reading ViperChill certainly worth it!
Many readers of this post have already said what I wanted to write in the comment section.
So without repeating all that I just want to say, You are one of my 3 favorite SEO bloggers.

Google are definitely out in full force at the moment, but as you point out, their targeting seems a bit suspect or somewhat misguided at times,

It’s interesting to hear that Doc’s site got penalized because of one or two posts… sadly I have first hand experience of that myself as of a few weeks ago. My web development site (which has a small insignificant blog) got a site wide manual penalty for posting one guest post without nofollowing the author link. The penalty was for outgoing links, not incoming links, so it was either for selling links or guest posts without nofollow… and since I’ve never sold a link on that site EVER, I imagine it could only be the guest post.

Two things are ironic about this: 1) my site was hit the same day that MyBlogGuest was hit (and yes, I have used their service on a number of my sites), and 2) I’d only ever posted one guest post on this site. So for one guest post I got wacked it seems…

Getting the penalty lifted was interesting as well. I nofollowed the links in the guest post and resubmitted with a detailed explanation on how I’ve never sold a link on this site and how I’ve nofollowed the links in the only guest post i’ve published… Well that request was rejected and my penalty remained. It was only after I nofollowed all outgoing links on my site except a few to quality resources like Moz, did they lift the penalty and give me my toolbar PR back.

And this is a site that I don’t do anything dodgy on, and honestly couldn’t care less about rankings for… it just doesn’t make sense!

Great article, Glen.
I was confused recently when I was repeatedly asked by a really popular tech company to remove/nofollow links from my related technical site. The webmaster’s answer just added to my confusion. I can deduce now that they probably are not a Google customer

I noticed a job ad here in Australia from LionBridge who were recruiting “Search quality contractors – to help improve the results” – I applied for fun, but got rejected when they saw I had done some SEO (I assume).

I happen to know personally someone who was a manual reviewer for one of the contracting companies that Google outsources to. They have very strict guidelines and from what I was told they don’t play games. If the reviews were found to be sub-par you’re out the door.

Ultimately, there will always be an unfair slant towards business that have clout (read.. millions) its just not good business to upset people with deep pockets… Thanks for another great post!

I am in the home improvement industry and use Houzz extensively. I have their widgets on my site in fact- but I edit the keywords out. I could never see why I needed them…

For anyone with a local home improvement company it is discouraging to see Houzz and Yelp dominate the rankings so thoroughly. But we have no one to blame but ourselves- we put the widgets and badges on our sites.

Not disagreeing with that at all- it is deceptive and I am sure it has facilitated Houzz’s meteoric rise in the rankings over the last 2 years.
Just pointing out that those of who share the local home improvement space w/ Houzz and Yelp have helped put them where they are.

Awesome post. I noticed the other day when adding Clicky analytics to my site that within the code they tell you to add is their badge as a clickable image with alt and title tags of “Google Analytics Alternative”. Looks like they’re up to the same tricks, although they aren’t ranking yet for that keyword phrase.

These techniques seem very dated. It’s hard to believe stuff like this still works. Although with every technique you’ll find some people benefit from it and others getting nowhere. Very insightful though.

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About

Hey, I'm Glen. In February 2009 I quit my full-time job and have made my living from the internet ever since. Having previously worked as the Social Media Manager for the likes of Nissan and Hewlett Packard, I took my skills and successfully applied them to my own projects. ViperChill is the place I share everything I've learned in order to help other people make a living online, and to live in the Cloud.

Unlike most people in this industry, I don't make my living online by teaching other people how to make their living online. If you would like to learn more about me, then click here.